Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 23, 2026
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Episodes Episode #2452 Segments
NewsReaction Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 2452 CWSA 04/22/24

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uct is. They tell you why they bought it and what it's good for and why they're going to buy it again. And apparently the man cave turned into a lot of people who don't have anybody to talk to during the day. It has something like a personal experience because when I do the man caves I'm just interacting with the comments the entire time. So it's like a conversation for shy people. Like if you're…

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u couldn't use it.

But suppose you open it up and it was, let's say, four to six charts that just showed you the direction of things. And let's say one of the charts is crime. So you could click on it and then you could explode it by city. Maybe you could look at it by Democrat versus Republican. That'd be a little more provocative. But I'd love to do that to find out whose policies seem to be working. And imagine if you could just drill down on all of those questions. And then at the bottom you could get the best pro and con argument on that topic. So the data itself doesn't tell you the story. You still need the interpretation. But you want the best ones.

So imagine if you had that dashboard that anybody, any citizen, can log into and you can just see everything that's going on money-wise. I think it'd be amazing. Anyway, so I think whoever builds that dashboard will necessarily control the world. Because what you put on the front page will be what everybody cares about. So effectively you could front-run all of the news. You could make the news entities useless by simply having a dashboard that wouldn't be the news per se. But if you were the one who controlled what got highlighted and what got put down in priority, you would effectively control the country. Because if you wanted to highlight, for example, we wasted a bunch of money on this thing, you just put it on the front page and say it's just the dashboard. So that's how easy it would be to control the whole country.

Rasmussen did some polls on whether people thought Trump was going to get a fair trial in New York City. 42% of US voters think that it's likely Trump will be able to get a fair trial. 42%. I don't know how good you are at math but let me fill you in. 42 is less than half. Less than half of the citizens polled in the United States, voters, likely voters, don't believe that it's even possible to get a fair trial in New York City if you're Trump.

Now how many people do you think say not only would Trump get a fair trial but it's very likely? What percentage do you think say it's very likely Trump will get a fair trial in New York City? Let's see how close you can get on this guess. Very good, very good. Yeah, a lot of you are guessing 25% and it's 27%. It's 27%. Yeah, but I'm going to round that off and say your 25 is correct. And once again your brilliance, if not your sex appeal, is coming through again. Let me say that the sapiosexuals who were attracted to intelligent people are probably just having quite a time now. Because when they see how smart you are, that you can answer a question like that with no prior knowledge, you just all knew it was around the quarter. Amazing, amazing.

But 51% think that Trump won't get a fair trial and 31% say it's not at all likely. Now here's my thing. If you have a situation in which the general public, which is pretty much paying attention because it's Trump, they are paying attention, if more than half say he can't get a fair trial, how in the world do you put him in jail if he's convicted? If more than half of the people watching say it's probably not fair, how do you do that? You can't maintain the system if you put them in jail while people think it's unfair or very likely to be unfair. So it seems to me that should be grounds for challenging it. But I don't think legally it is, is it?

I go back to the interesting story of how speed limits are determined in residential neighborhoods. I think I've told you this before. Maybe it's just a California thing, I don't know. But the way they determine a speed limit in a new road, if it's a residential, not a freeway because those are just standard speeds, but in the neighborhoods they'll actually monitor how people actually drive before they put up the speed limit signs. And they say, okay, it looks like people just naturally think they can drive 45 on the street, so we'll lower it to 35 because we know they'll cheat a little bit. So the idea here is that you create a law that you believe people will accept as reasonable because you looked at all the reasons, subtracted 10. Everybody knows you subtracted 10. Everybody's happy.

So a very good way to run a country is to see if people think it would be fair and then do the thing that most people think would be fair. That's stable. But if you do the thin

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g that most people, literally a majority, think is not likely to be fair and you do it right in front of them, that's your worst case scenario. Worst case scenario. They're doing that right in front of us. Well, let's talk about the plot to make Bidenomics look good. Zero Hedge is talking about commercial real estate foreclosures at their highest level in a decade. I don't know how big a deal tha…

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